Welcome to American Jihadists

Welcome to AmericanJihadists.com, a new Web site in the INTELWIRE.com family. This site will start as a blog connecting to resources and documents on the subject of American citizens who take part in military jihad activities.

The blog will give way in 2010 to a broader and more ambitious Web site that provides detailed source material from my forthcoming book, "American Jihadists." I hope to have an update soon with details about the book release.

The subject of American Jihadists is fairly complex and has not received the media attention it deserves. There are dozens of cases of American citizens who have been arrested and indicted for various jihad-related activities.

There are also cases in which Americans have taken part in military jihad overseas but have not been indicted and those who are not linked to terrorism. While some in the media characterize jihad as synonymous with terrorism, that is not always the case, and this distinction will be explored further in the book. However the majority of the cases featured on this site will have some sort of terrorism component, because those are the stories which become known to the public.

You will note several posts which go back as far as March 2008. To get up and running, I imported relevant entries (along with their original post dates) from the Intelfiles.com blog. The site's actual launch date is today, Wednesday, November 4, 2009.

A final note: There are many inside and outside of the Muslim community who will point out that jihad is not always associated with a military dimension. This site is specifically about people -- mostly men -- who take part in military jihad and related support activities. The people being profiled here themselves describe their activities as jihad, and where applicable, this site will use their terminology.

Labels: American-Jihadists, Site-News

Views expressed on INTELWIRE are those of the author alone.

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